Eucatastrophe Readertag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-868425604115064442018-12-03T20:56:31-08:00eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.
TypePad"We call the factories 'sleep dealers', because if you work long enough, you collapse."tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad3a4f1fd200d2018-12-03T20:56:31-08:002018-12-03T20:56:31-08:00Sleep Dealer Review “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition,...Philip Crossman

Sleep Dealer Review

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

- Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” Speech given April 4, 1967 in New York City

For decades, America has been welcoming (or at least tolerating) immigration from countries south of us. Generally, while eschewing any caste system in American society and while touting ourselves as the place to come and pursue the American dream, we have relegated these immigrants to jobs that we do not aspire to see our children having to take. Imagine that America got to the place where we do not wish to remain open to such immigrants (I know it is hard, but try). What if we could build a wall to keep them out, make life less viable in the countries where they come from by buying up all the rights to their water (del Rio water is the name of the corporation in the film) , and then setting up sweatshops full of a technology that would allow them to wire themselves up and then do their work in America, sans benefits, protections, livable wages, education, medical care, or even relationship. Imagine if they could be kept in Mexico where they did their work by means of virtual reality tech.

Sleep Dealer imagines that reality for us.

The movie opens with a Mexican family trying to get enough water to grow anything on its land. It attempts to access water that was once the fountainhead of a meager existence, only to find that it is fenced off and guarded by video cameras installed by the American companies that own the water. An attempt to acquire water is met with a drone attack. And who is piloting that drone? Non other than a fellow Mexican hired by one of the American water cartels to rain down retribution on some distant cousin in Mexico trying to grow food for a family. It’s a harsh reality. The only option? Get a “node job” and become a “sleep dealer” - a worker who lives his entire work-life in Tijuana in a long corrugated metal culvert converted into a “factory” – imagine a factory with thousands of workers in it that looks basically like a large sewer pipe. His job involves inhabiting a robot on an American high rise building virtually by means of the life draining techno-wiring of a VR system implanted into his nervous system for that purpose.

That is the setting of this dystopia.

The ending will tell you all you need to know about how you would feel about this level of exploitation if you had been born in Mexico and if you were presently on the receiving end of policies that seem to be heading where this dystopian vision heads.

I will not spoil the movie for you.

One of the things I appreciated about this film was how it reminded me (as I was reminded last week when reporting on Basma Abdel Aziz’s Egyptian dystopia in Cairo) that Americans do not “own the genre” and that non-western dystopian visions exist as well – and we have much to learn by viewing the future from the eyelids of “the brothers who are called the opposition.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever been exploited?

“I had started on a path of awareness.”tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad37c1a22200c2018-11-22T19:35:47-08:002018-11-22T19:35:47-08:00Educated by Tara Westover REVIEW This is a story of a mind, like a fugitive slave making its way to Canada through an underground railroad called “education.” Tara Westover’s domineering father and his religion-fueled empire of certainty provides the “Iron Curtain” from behind which Tara must escape as a child,...Philip Crossman

Educated by Tara Westover REVIEW

This is a story of a mind, like a fugitive slave making its way to Canada through an underground railroad called “education.” Tara Westover’s domineering father and his religion-fueled empire of certainty provides the “Iron Curtain” from behind which Tara must escape as a child, a teenager, and a young adult. It is a fascinating story full of courage, hope, despair, and loss. Educated should be read by everyone who spends their life educating, being educated, - or anyone who has ever had a family or plans to have one.

“This story is not about Mormonism,” Tara Westover says in her preface, acknowledging that it was not her father’s religion so much as his mental condition and sense of certainty that had made it so difficult for her to individuate.

“Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two.”

In other words, she seems to be arguing that it is not religion that created a father like this. It was a father like this that created an expression of a particular religion. One senses throughout the book that the levers of parental control were seldom left untouched. Repetition, certainty, an appeal to divine sanction, modeling, coercion, shaming, threats, conditional care, dishonesty, outright violence, intimidation, suggestions of potential abandonment, and a host of other mechanisms of thought control make it seem as though Tara’s resistance and escape are unlikely. Any hope that she might have would have to come from her mother and as the story unwinds, that becomes less and less likely. Tara’s father’s ideology is doubly potent. He does not only assert his authority frequently, it always comes with a divine sanction. And he does not simply vie for partial agreement. His expectations are totalitarian. And if this was not enough, he provides a constant stream of accusation against any and all potential detractors.

“There’s two kinds of them college professors,” the author’s father says to her brother when the young man suggest that he might want to go to school,

“Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth. Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.”

“A son of mine, standing in line to get brainwashed by socialists and Illuminati spies,” he exclaims incredulously, making it clear that disagreement is defection and defection is worthy only of familial abandonment. And yet this moment of her brother’s liberation is essential to Tara’s own attempt to overcome her double difficult escape (in the Westover form of Mormonism, girls have no natural reason to go to a school, much less a college). “It happens sometimes in families,” Tara writes of her older brother’s declaration of independence, “one child who doesn't fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler.”

… until it was her.

Tara is raised in a junkyard basically. Her parents believe that public schools are tools of government propaganda and that government is an expression f Satanic control. Her father prepares for the apocalypse in whatever way he can. He has disdain for anyone who goes to a hospital or sees a doctor. He dismisses all safety precautions that might be normal in a scrap yard and particularly one with children working in it. Children are not immunized. They have angels. “God and his angels are here working alongside us” he says when Tara suggests taking some measure of precaution against injury. Everyone in the community is either “us” or “them.” If your kids go to a school, if your daughters dress immodestly, if you take medicine instead of using herbal remedies with faith, you are “them.” “Herbals operate by faith,” her father insists, “You can’t put your trust in a Dr. and then ask the Lord to heal you.” When her brother sustains a severe head injury in a motorcycle accident, Tara’s father insists on bringing him home and not taking him to a hospital. “Your mother can handle it,” he says. If an appeal is made to her mom, it is met with a counter-strike, “A man should be able to expect support for his wife,” her dad insists.

If someone falls off a roof in the middle of a construction project, it is not because some safety measures were not insisted on. It is because “God wanted him to fall.” “I am not driving faster than our angels can fly,” her father argues when driving at break-neck speed through a snow storm. The Westover home looked forward to the collapse of the state the night of Y2K. “I had always known that my father believed in a different God,” Tara writes,

“ … They [other Mormons in town] believed in modesty. We practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal. We left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the second coming. We actually prepared.”

Ideological indoctrination is relentless, insistent, unavoidable. “Surrender your mind to the all knowing father and his God or find some other place to live” seems to be the message that all his children were given. The moment when Tara opts to take her brother to the hospital instead of taking him home is a pivotal one. It is the moment when she must decide between responsible love for her brother and obedience to her dad (a pretty wicked decision for any teenager to have to make). “There was an instinct at work in me – a learned intuition.” Tara says, of her attempt to follow out the two trajectories of her soul. “The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter,” she says of those first decisions. “I am a traitor – a wolf among sheep. There is something different about me. … I am not sorry. Merely ashamed.” She knows that she will be made to pay, and she does.

“Home had changed the moment I had taken Sean to that hospital. I had rejected some part of it. Now it was rejecting me.”

In a story about a wild owl her family tried to domesticate, she betrays her own situation. “It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong.” “I had started on a path of awareness,” … she says and begins trying to figure out how a kid raised without school in a junk yard on the side of a mountain in Idaho can get into a college and pay for it all on her own. “I decided to experiment with normality” she says, “For 19 years I had lived the way my father wanted. Now I would try something else.”

One would think that this would be easy but no one who has ever been raised by parents who saw their way as God’s way is likely to agree. It is no easy thing to “live in your own mind and not in someone else’s” she discovers. “It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,” one of her early college journals records. “I believed then and part of me will always believe that my father’s words ought to be my own.” The life she lived as a child “had a hold on her,” she admits, a hold that she might not ever break. She talks about how in trying to become herself, she often felt like not herself – having never been allowed to have a self before. “I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be,” she says. And then … she begins to create a self as a response to her education. “First find out what you are capable of,” one of her teachers tells her, “Then decide who you are.”

This is not a message she ever received at home.

The psychological process of rebuilding a self at the age of 19 is a messy, tangled, disorienting thing to watch unfold. “Its astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion” she will say to herself of some of her fathers more outlandish notions. And, “Although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.” Her education has moments of resistance and regression as when she says something like “I knew my yearning was unnatural” or “My dreams were perversions” and then it will have moments of transcendence and radical reframing, as though tectonic plates in the substructure of her personality just shift - as in the moment when she reads John Stewart Mill say “Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known” or hears the lyrics of a song that practically chisels the chains off her mind.

Soon, the tell-tale signs of her liberation can be felt throughout her life. “My life had diverged from my sisters …” she notes on one visit back from school. “We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance between us” she says of her father on one these visits to the family home. “I could admire the past without being silenced by it” she says when on a trip to Rome with friends at Cambridge (where she obtained a scholarship to study History). Of those friends, she writes, “Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. … I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given.”

“I had built a new life …” she says as she narrates the painful experience of losing her family (or most of it.

The chapter in which she details her father’s attempt to bring her back into the fold (or into his empire) is particularly excruciating as it almost literally strangles you with her dilemma. “All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs and I could have my family,” she says of her parents. All that was needed was to trade her own reality for theirs and let them take over the job of constructing her mind. “If I yielded now,” she says in describing that moment,

“I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. … What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon. It was me.”

Tara Westover’s book asks everyone who has ever had a family that cared about who they grew up to be profound questions. “What is a person to do when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations - to friends, to society, to themselves?” And “Is the first shape a person takes, their only true shape?”

Clearly, if she can become someone she was not raised by her parents to be, we all can - If this is what we wish.

Question for Comment: How much more or less freedom to construct their own selves were your children given relative to what you were given?

The Rise and fall of Jackson's Meadowstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad3be8162200b2018-11-07T19:40:19-08:002018-11-07T19:40:47-08:00Communal Organization and Social Transition REVIEW Yesterday, Vermonters voted on a number of statewide positions. They basically had to choose between a Republican and a Democratic candidate for Governor. Phil Scott, the Republican incumbent won by a substantial margin. The Democratic candidate was the country’s first major party trans-gendered woman....Philip Crossman

Communal Organization and Social Transition REVIEW

Yesterday, Vermonters voted on a number of statewide positions. They basically had to choose between a Republican and a Democratic candidate for Governor. Phil Scott, the Republican incumbent won by a substantial margin. The Democratic candidate was the country’s first major party trans-gendered woman. The following map indicates that she won in towns connected somehow with colleges (Bennington College, Middlebury College, UVM, Goddard, Dartmouth and Marlboro in the Brattleboro area). Marlboro, ironically, plays a key role in the “hippie invasion” of the early 70’s that is the subject of this book review. It is the Vermont town with the highest percentage of support for Christine Hallquist in this recent election.

You can see all that blue in the lower Eastern part of Vermont that surrounds Marlboro. That region is the object of Barry Laffan’s study. Conducted for his Ph.D. research in Anthropology in the early 1970’s, this book explores the origins and demise of the sixty some-odd communes that were active in the Brattleboro area in 1970 to 1972.

In the introduction to the work, Marboro’s professor, Gerald Levy writes about the subjects and quality of Laffan’s study:

“The array of street people, bakers without bikes, back to the land hippies, revolutionary politicos, X political contemplative artists, aging academic seekers, resilient commune mothers, libertarian mystics, and eclectic religious fundamentalists provides the ethnographic basis for an analysis of counterculture politics which is not been matched.”

Barry Laffan lived in one of the communes (“Jackson’s Meadows” he calls it) while he was conducting his research. In the work, he refers to himself as “Patrick.”

“It was the anthropologist Barry who would go back to his camper and type his field notes every night, no matter how much ‘Patrick’ had drunk during the evening.”

In his introduction to his research Laffan writes of the counter cultural movement he observed with guarded enthusiasm:

“Simultaneously seduced by the utopian promises, yet repulsed by the runaway fantasies that accompanied them, I watched the rebellion unfold to include communalism and collectivism as positive ideals, along with negative stances regarding racism, war, corporate capitalism, and after the police riots at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, established political process.”

As of 1972, there were between one and two thousand people living in the Brattleboro area communes with many more transients moving in and out of them. “It was felt,” Laffan tells us, “that the spread of new ideas was more important than working out the bothersome details of fiscal responsibility” noting that half the founders of Jackson’s Meadows came from broken homes, that many lacked employable skills, and many had been unable to navigate the rigors of real college (Marlboro college, at that time, was hardly what one could call “rigorous”).

The following quote captures the essence of the human material out of which these utopias were to be formed.

“What had happened to these people after turning hippie radical freak? Most were in the process of rebounding like pinballs from situations they had gotten into after bidding farewell to the street life: unhappy college experiences, terrible jobs, isolation, broken love affairs, or abuse of certain drugs. In the search for meaning and the reasons for the misfortunes that had befallen them, major shifts in intellectual and emotional orientation were occurring. Two ex-radicals, after finding that political revolutions were not completed after a semester or two, and after discovering that being mauled by the police was out-right traumatic, were in the process of moving away from radical politics, though they retained their conviction that the quality of life in America was terrible. Another was in the process of building the very political perspective the other two had abandoned. Yet another was moving from an interpersonal psychiatric orientation towards out right mysticism. There were many people who did not know which way to move. All this is not to say that the Dobson house was total confusion and despair. Many were enjoying their free-floating status, being only mildly concerned about lack of direction, while others, though repulsed by certain past experiences, were eagerly attempting to discover new possibilities.

“Everyone who eventually joined Jackson's Meadows was in a liminal state; that is, they were attached to no fixed ideology and no fixed institutions. . . .”

“Not everyone, however, held to these ideals with equal enthusiasm. Some agreed to go along with the idea only because there were no other alternatives. Even among those who professed commitment, there were deep vague fears of failure of losing more than they could gain. Finally, they were competing commitments. Some joined the venture because of loyalties to individuals in the group, others to the group as a whole, and still others to an ideal.”

Laffan applies many sociological and anthropological theories in an attempt to understand the “hippie invasion” into Vermont, but he summarizes his primary thesis in this sentence:

“Perhaps the overall factor was that the sheer complexity and confusion of the society itself had out stripped the capacity of those, not in control of it, to cope with it.”

A generational short-circuit you might say.

Many chapters of the book explain the rise and fall of Jackson’s Meadows and time does not permit a record of the details (but they include a house fire that literally killed people). In the end, Jackson’s Meadows was doomed, like Fruitlands, by the inability of its founders to take the material as seriously as the esoteric. “The good life is like a zebra,” I sometimes say. “There are white parts and black parts and you cannot just feed the white parts and expect your zebra to live.” Life is spirit and flesh and a utopia that ignores one or the other will eventually find itself a dystopia. Laffan writes in his conclusion,

“Talk of self-sufficiency, barter, reducing financial needs, and anti-materialistic concerns with human and spiritual values notwithstanding, Jackson's Meadows’ growing isolation had fundamental economic ramifications that affected nearly everything else. Consuming much of the commune’s attention, time, and energy was its constant struggle to obtain money. Jackson's Meadows was becoming a real ghetto with a poverty that was neither voluntary nor ennobling. Unlike the first winter when Peter and some others had some cash reserves to bail the commune out of emergencies, there was no one in a comparable position this winter. All commune money had to come from people earning it, and taxes had to be paid, tools, stoves, and insulation had to be purchased, and grains had to be obtained insufficient quantities to last through the winter.”

“Jackson's Meadows was in a particularly bad position. Full-time members needed money desperately, yet many were unemployable due to mental illness, later stages of pregnancy, single motherhood with dependent young children, and the danger of being jailed if some real identities or Social Security numbers were known.”

“As far as much of Jackson’s Meadows work force was concerned, eventually no monetary need was worth formally working for it if the job interfered with their other interests too much.”

The chapter on the demise of Jackson’s Meadows is fascinating stuff.

I will conclude by saying that it is a mistake to think that utopia’s can be created out of some guy named Peter’s inheritance. Someone has to make traps or silverware. A utopia has to have a plan for paying that involves self-sufficiency. It cannot thrive on someone else’s income transferred to it because the members’ hair is long and they have learned how to obtain and smoke weed.

Having said that, the “hippies” who came to Vermont have given the state a gift in my estimation. They remind us that the pursuit of happiness has to be more than the pursuit of stuff. And along with that, they remind us that as important as it may be to go to college and obtain employable skills, it is a mistake to neglect the importance of humanities, and the study of things like utopias and dystopias and the life of the soul in this world.

Question for Comment: If you were to start a commune, what would you do to support it?

"They think we're dirt. We are not dirt."tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad3bc89da200b2018-10-30T21:43:01-07:002018-10-30T21:43:01-07:00Black Sea REVIEW The seaweed is always greener In somebody else's lake You dream about going up there But that is a big mistake Just look at the world around you Right here on the ocean floor Such wonderful things surround you What more is you lookin' for? “Under the...Philip Crossman

Black Sea REVIEW

The seaweed is always greener In somebody else's lake You dream about going up there But that is a big mistake Just look at the world around you Right here on the ocean floor Such wonderful things surround you What more is you lookin' for?

“Under the Sea” - The Little Mermaid

Part Das Boot, part Sparticus, part Oceans Eleven, the film Black Sea is a tense suspenseful submarine movie with a political edge. An experienced submarine captain is fired because his company wants to bait him into doing a dangerous job for them for free. They manipulate him with a fake investor who agrees to fund a treasure hunt in an old Soviet Submarine. Dreaming of finally getting a piece of the proverbial pie, he sets off to sea in an old tub of a submarine and a crew of “pirates” to get lost gold from an abandoned Nazi submarine in the bottom of the Black Sea.

Dangers lurk in the sea bottom below. Greater dangers lurk in the waters above (the Russian navy will be looking for them). The greatest dangers however lurk among the crew itself as they quickly fall to killing one another over greed, over the gold, or even a slight insult or superstition if it comes to hand. The movie leaves you understanding why these men are so bitter about how the “one-percenters” always seem to get the benefits of their work. But it also leaves you understanding why it is that they have no chance against them. Their plan, on the surface a good one (no pun intended), is blown sky high (or sea bottom deep as it turns out) by their own prejudices, impulses, pathologies, and avarice.

None of these pirates seem to have a clue how to work collaboratively for long and, unable to work for a common goal with common purpose in a sustainable way, they doom themselves to something that ultimately will amount to less than minimum wage in the employment of Davy Jones.

Question for Comment: After seeing the film, how might it be used to explain why it is that so often the plan of the working classes seem to go awry?

"The Invasion"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad376a01e200c2018-10-30T07:56:18-07:002018-10-30T07:57:37-07:00Going Up the Country REVIEW Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, & Radicals Moved to Vermont is written by a fellow faculty member at my college, Yvonne Daley. “My Vermont story began in 1967,” she says in her introduction, “when my first husband and I left graduate...Philip Crossman

Going Up the Country REVIEW

Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, & Radicals Moved to Vermont is written by a fellow faculty member at my college, Yvonne Daley. “My Vermont story began in 1967,” she says in her introduction, “when my first husband and I left graduate school at the University of Dayton to move to Vermont, which seems saner than Boston where I had grown up or the New Jersey of Steve's childhood.” Like many young people who came at the time, eventually, the responsibilities of adulthood began to catch up to them. “By the mid-1970s,” she confesses, “as the economy changed, we found living on next to nothing less glamorous ... or possible.” But one gets the feeling that she has hung on to the counterculture as much as she could.

The book is an attempt to capture the story of the “hippie invasion” of Vermont in the decade between 1965 and 1975. Between those years, Daley writes,

“up to 100,000 young people with counterculture ideas had travelled north to the Green Mountains. Most were temporary visitors but, by 1972, thousands of hippies and people who identified with counter culture values we're living in Vermont communes on collectives, in group houses, in teepees, school buses, sugar shacks, and farm houses across the state.”

In her opening chapters, she tries to distil the foundational causes of the migration into Vermont during this period and to outline the different communities that formed to harbor the cultural refugees.

“And while the commune provided a way to extend childhood into adulthood, to live cheaply with people with whom you might share history and ideology, it was also a place to discover what made you uncomfortable, to discover your own limits. Some communes were successful and others were deadly; some communard's lost their virginity; some lost their minds. Some found a reason to be. They had names like Frog Run, Tree Frog, Total Loss Farm, Maple Hill, Mad Brook Farm, May Day, Milkweed Hill, Johnson Pasture, Mullein Hill, Rock Bottom Farm, Green Mountain Rd., Mount Philo, Quarry Hill, Wooden Shoe, Red Bird, Earth People's Park, Entropy Acres, Free State of the Arc, Fishers farm, New Morning, Pie in the Sky, and many, many more.”

“Total Loss Farm was for the intellectuals and writers; Red Clover was for the educated, affluent kids with radical ideation; and nearby Johnson Pasture was the Ellis Island of the commune movement, drawing people with nowhere to go and nothing else to do.”

In the years of “the invasion” and in the years since, Vermont’s cultural landscape has been impacted by these newcomers just as it has always been impacted by newcomers. Daley recounts the variety of impacts in subsequent chapters that go into the counter-cultural influence on agriculture, business, education, art, music, politics, drug use, and demographics.

What emerges is a picture of people coming to a State that had always valued the independence of the individual and found those values tested by a tidal wave of extremes personified. Eventually, these folks found a welcome home and continue the Vermont tradition of extending the right to be different to all who wish to come and be different.

Question for Comment: As you look at your life, can you find any ways that you are “counter-cultural”? Why?

"Just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified video game.”tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad39cac2d200d2018-10-29T21:56:27-07:002018-10-29T21:56:27-07:00Ready Player One REVIEW What is the appropriate balance between engaging life and escaping it? Between facing reality and imagining a fantasy? Between actual experience and vicarious adventure? Ready Player One places us in a dystopian future (2045) where people live trailer trash lives in high rise trailer parks with...Philip Crossman

Ready Player One REVIEW

What is the appropriate balance between engaging life and escaping it? Between facing reality and imagining a fantasy? Between actual experience and vicarious adventure? Ready Player One places us in a dystopian future (2045) where people live trailer trash lives in high rise trailer parks with nothing but VR goggles and VR games to feed their souls. In these virtual worlds, they spend real money to make fake virtual money. In their VR worlds, their avatars are charming and skilled and ripped and experts in martial arts. In their actual lives, they are pathetic, and clumsy, and homely, and unable to defend themselves even against the abuses of scum bag step-uncles. The movie is a response to the following assertion. “Being human totally sucks most of the time. Video games are the only thing that makes life bearable.” “If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life,” says Wade, the main character,

“all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.”

But eventually, people living such grim lives realize that fake-life does not satisfy (this comes as a Buddha-like revelation to them).

“Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture–obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified video game.”

In the film, everyone lives these alternate lives in a world created by a socially inept super-genius by the name of James Halliday who, at the end of his life, also realized what a tragedy it was that he lived his life in a virtual world. “I created the OASIS,” Halliday says,

“because I never felt at home in the real world. I just didn't know how to connect with people there. I was afraid for all my life, right up until the day I knew my life was ending. And that was when I realized that... as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also... the only place that... you can get a decent meal. Because, reality... is real.”

Nothing is being said here that was not said, and perhaps said better, by Robert Frost.

Consider Frost’s poem, Birches, where the poet wanders back and forth between reality and imagination like a boy swinging up and down on birches. Eventually, the poem concludes

I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.

For Wade Watts, the principle male lead in the story, the need for fake adventures ends when he finds a real girl behind one of the avatars in his virtual world. “I’d come to see my rig for what it was,” he says of his gaming equipment,

“an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn’t exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.”

Earth is the right place for love apparently. And thus, once he has obtained ownership of The Oasis through his exploits, he shuts the game down on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s ironic really. Two out of seven days in the real world has come to define what it means to live a balanced life.

Question for Comment: How much of your life is spent in an imaginative space? How healthy is your balance right now?

"But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding."tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad3bc428e200b2018-10-29T17:34:08-07:002018-10-29T17:34:08-07:00The Queue REVIEW Basma Abdel Aziz’ novel is dystopian fiction, political satire, and a statement of vigorous religious and social dissent. It can at times remind the reader of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (there are multiple characters telling their stories). At times it reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (in...Philip Crossman

The Queue REVIEW

Basma Abdel Aziz’ novel is dystopian fiction, political satire, and a statement of vigorous religious and social dissent. It can at times remind the reader of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (there are multiple characters telling their stories). At times it reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (in that it provides political critique with a biting sarcasm). It reminds one of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago (lone author single handedly taking on a totalitarian regime). There are moments when the reader may find themselves referencing the play, Waiting for Godot as people in the queue wait for something that never comes (a responsive government instead of God). I also found myself thinking of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary essay Common Sense (a clear voice demanding that an oppressed people wake up and “do something” to free themselves from tyranny). Lastly, we are reminded of Hanna Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil” as illustrated by the trial of Adolf Eichmann (evil by bureaucratic paper cuts).

In The Queue, A man (Yeya) is shot in the abdomen by security forces during a political protest event called “the shameful event.” His wound requires medical treatment and there is a doctor (Tarek) who understands that the treatment is required but who will not risk his own life and career to perform the surgery until the state has given its blessing to do so. To get permission for his surgery, Yeya joins an ever lengthening queue of people who need something from the government (called “The Gate”). Yeya’s need just happens to be vital to his own survival. He is slowly bleeding to death while he waits. The story introduces us to the various stories of the people in the queue who share his fate or who are not in the queue but are aware of it. The line continues to grow. The door to “The Gate” never opens. And all the while a citizen slowly bleeds to death. Of this government, Basma Aziz writes:

“If it weren’t for the people who’d once entered it and told of all the rooms and offices inside, anyone gazing up at it would have imagined it to be a massive block, solid and impenetrable.”

The line reminded me of a line in Stephen Crane’s short story, the Open Boat.

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: ‘Yes, but I love myself.’ A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.”

As the story progresses, the source of the people’s frustration and loss of freedom is progressively unveiled. Granting the State control of the military, the press, communication systems, religion, the economy, the courts, and essential social and health services has rendered the people incapable of resistance to their government’s indifference to them. Demanding what they deserve and are paying for is likely to wind up depriving them of the little they have.

To get services from “The Gate,” citizens need a “certificate of true citizenship” and this is a reward for constant compliance, not a right. Jefferson notes in the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances that human beings will typically put up with abuses rather than do something about them, until those abuses reach a point of phase transition. This appears to be what Basma Abdel Aziz is trying to inspire. Interestingly, the Bill of Rights may have been added to the Constitution to keep the government from gaining precisely the control of the levers of despotism that we see here (Control of religion, control of the press, control of free speech, control of weapons, control of private information, control of the judicial system, control of assembly, etc.)

As the plot progresses and we learn more about the people caught up in Yeya’s unfolding tragedy, the author continually reminds us of the growing size of the queue. Here are some passages I culled from the entire novel that indicate this swelling population of the neglected.

“The queue grew longer and longer every day, and the space it took up grew ever wider. He noticed that while only a few people left and didn’t return, new waves arrived every day, stretching the queue ever farther.”

“From afar, it [the door to the government office building] looked like a solid wall, and he wondered in despair whether it would ever open.”

“It took a year or two or even more for the Gate of Maladies to begin the paperwork needed to take action, and there were crumbling papers in its old chambers that had been waiting for decades to be finalized. Some, the descendants of the plaintiffs followed up on, while others were kept in trust, never to be discarded, even if no one ever asked about them again.”

“Yehya received an endless stream of news from his new position in the queue, which was no longer at the end, as it had been when he first got there, because dozens more people had since arrived behind him.”

“There was no shortage of reports on when the Gate would open, and this was the greatest source of chaos and contention. People at the end of the queue swapped stories that the Gate had already opened, while those stuck in the middle said they had a week ahead of them at most. Other stubborn rumors, whose provenance no one knew, said that the people standing at the front had heard voices coming from behind the Gate: whole conversations, the rustling of papers, the clatter of cups and spoons. But when these rumors finally reached the people at the front, they said they’d only seen shadows, arriving and departing, but that the gate hadn’t opened and no one had ever actually appeared.”

“People kept arriving at the queue, and the numbers continued to rise, so much so that they would soon block out the sun. But despite how crowded it was, the people in the queue lived their lives and solved their own problems without help from anyone.”

“The queue forked around here and extended ever farther, and no one cared to speculate how long or vast it was anymore.”

“People passed hearsay, a growing number of leaflets, and newspaper articles along the queue; they feverishly searched for fresh information anywhere and any way they could, while time passed and no one moved an inch forward.”

Aziz has described an almost pathological sense of resignation and subservience in the populace of her fictional (but real) society. There are certainly characters who are moving towards resistance (Dr. Tarek) and there are characters who began as rebels but are bullied into compliance (Amani) but as a general rule, the mass of people in the queue are just as stuck in their “queue-ocratic state of mind” as they are stuck in the queue itself.

I thought it might be interesting to examine the citizens of The Queue and their relationship to their government by using the lens of the American Bill of Rights. Citizens of Egypt, in Aziz’s view, have none of these protections. In the society she describes, state sponsored religion participates in the repression of the people.

In the society she describes, the press and speech is whole subservient to the interests of “the Gate.”

In the society she describes, assembly in protest is regarded as a national crime.

In the society she describes all military capability is reserved to the state and its authorized delegates.

In the society that she describes, citizens have no protection from intrusions into their privacy (either their phone conversations or their medical records).

In the society she describes, there is no due process. You can be accused, tried, and convicted without any representation. It can happen without you even knowing that you were accused. There is no need for a speedy trial, a trial of your peers, or any trial at all.

And finally, there is no obstacle to the state’s use of coercive force and even torture.

At the center of the story however, it becomes clear that control has gone beyond what the framers of our own Constitution thought to protect against: the weaponization of the social and health services system that it had not yet even imagined in the 1790’s. Aziz’s Egypt, in her view, has accepted the power of the state to leverage its own healthcare system such that a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound cannot get treatment without a “certificate of true citizenship.” Tarek, the doctor, is informed that he will “need a special permit if he intended to extract the bullet.”

Note how Aziz describes the pervasiveness of government control over essential services.

“Yehya shook his head in silence. Since the Gate had materialized and insinuated itself into everything, people didn’t know where its affairs ended and their own began.”

“As the ruler faded from the public eye, it was the Gate that increasingly began to regulate procedures, imposing rules and regulations necessary to set various affairs in motion. Then one day the Gate issued an official statement detailing its jurisdiction, which extended over just about everything anyone could think of. Before long, it controlled absolutely everything, and made all procedures, paperwork, authorizations, and permits—even those for eating and drinking—subject to its control.”

Consumer behavior is controlled.

“It imposed costly fees on everything; even window-shopping was now subject to a charge, to be paid for by people out doing errands as well as those simply strolling down the sidewalk. To pay for the cost of printing all the documents it needed, the Gate deducted a portion of everyone’s salary. This way it could ensure a system of the utmost efficiency, capable of implementing its philosophy in full.”

The ability to conduct business is controlled.

“The Gate’s influence had begun to seep into businesses and organizations, onto the streets and into people’s homes.”

Education is controlled.

“He informed the principal that Ines was missing certain forms and that she needed to go to the Gate to obtain a Certificate of True Citizenship.”

Access to essential medication is controlled.

“People who take it say it’s available in public clinics, but you know how it is—they need permission from the Gate to fill your prescription.”

Access to religious services is controlled.

“She visited the High Sheikh, before that too was forbidden—forbidden, at least, without a permit from the Gate—and he told her bad luck followed her because she’d neglected her prayers.”

Access to a telephone is controlled.

“She remembered the notice she’d received from the Gate a year earlier, stating that she wasn’t entitled to a phone line due to misconduct.”

Access to employment is controlled.

“Sabah didn’t have much choice; the discussion was over in seconds. She was just a junior nurse there, young and insignificant, while the man on the other end was extremely senior, in age and position. Senior enough, perhaps, to fire her from this job and any other she might find, senior enough to shut down the entire hospital.”

Access to political representation is controlled.

“Silence gathered around him, as he raised his palms to the sky and called out: “Only those who have gone astray picked pyramid candidates!”

The press is controlled.

“Let’s talk on the way. You’re going to the queue, too, right? Listen, my boss doesn’t want to publish any more reports about the queue. He refused the article I wrote a week ago, and today he turned down another one, and before these two he took everything important out of an article I’d written about my trip to Zephyr Hospital with Amani. Can you believe it, he cut three whole paragraphs down to two and a half lines; it looked like a greeting card when he was done with it! And he even rejected my piece on the Violet Telecom boycott. He threw it down on his desk when he saw the headline, and then refused to give it back to me when I asked him for it.”

Free speech is controlled.

“Meanwhile, rumors spread that some people whose conversations had been recorded had disappeared; they’d been summoned to the basement and never returned.

Access to health care is controlled.

“Permits authorizing the removal of bullets shall not be granted, except to those who prove beyond doubt, and with irrefutable evidence, their full commitment to sound morals and comportment, and to those who are issued an official certificate confirming that they are a righteous citizen, or, at least, a true citizen. Certificates of True Citizenship that do not bear a signature from the Booth and the seal of the Gate shall not be recognized under any circumstances.”

“There was now yet another document to add to the growing stack of papers he needed to qualify for a permit; the road ahead grew longer, more difficult, and ever more complicated.”

“The official had photocopied it twice and told him there was just one more step: a personal interview at the Gate. If he passed this and was granted a Certificate of True Citizenship, it would automatically be added to his file there, along with the rest of his papers and documents. Then, when the Gate opened, they would consider his application for the permit to extract the bullet.”

During the course of the story, Yeya’s friend Amani determines to walk into the hospital and get Yeya’s medical records and x-rays so that he can be treated privately. She is detained and subjected to such reprisals that she finally leaves the building in a traumatized state. It is no wonder that people who are thus marinated in a state of permanent anxiety begin to lose their sense of autonomy. One of Aziz’s characters, Ines, we are told “never imagined she would fall victim to fear like this, having long considered herself one of the most resolute and resilient of people.”

Basma Abdel Aziz’s criticism of Egyptian government has only just begun however. “The most potent weapon in the mind of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” South African dissident, Steven Biko once said. And it is that oppression of the mind and not just the body that Aziz saves some of her most scathing criticism for. Note the way that “The Gate” controls the public’s own internal narrative even when the State’s narrative contradicts the individual citizen’s personal experience.

According to the State, Yeya was never shot.

“Furthermore, the report emphasized that no bullets had been visible on the man’s X-ray.”

He could not have been shot according to the State’s account of the events because no bullets were fired.

“She also told him that the Gate had released a statement claiming that no bullets had been fired at the place and time at which he had been injured. Several prominent journalists published full-page articles concurring that no bullets had been found, neither in the bodies of the dead nor of the injured. Eyewitnesses they quoted insisted that the people who caused the Disgraceful Events were just rioters who had suddenly ‘lost all moral inhibitions’ and flown into a frenzy: first they insulted one another, then they threw stones, and finally they seized iron bars from an old, vacant building belonging to the Gate. Any injuries they sustained were simply puncture wounds they suffered while struggling over the bars they’d wrenched off.”

Had people gone to the hospital? Maybe.

“On the phone, Amani read him a statement in The Truth newspaper made by an anonymous doctor supervising the treatment of the wounded at Zephyr Hospital. The doctor asserted that the high mortality rate was due to the fact that these rioters were simply too sensitive.”

Had anyone been killed in the uprising? No. All who died must have killed themselves.

“Some journalists went even further and published unconfirmed reports that the people who died were not in fact killed but had committed suicide when they saw what had happened. They even claimed that one of them had stabbed several others with an iron stake before turning it upon himself, Japanese seppuku-style.”

What if someone saw it otherwise? Best not to say so.

“He whispered in her ear that to obtain a Treatment Permit, she had to fill out a new application, praising the care her dearly departed daughter had received before her time was up.”

Aziz portrays a society where the people’s narrative of anything has lost all relevance. No one cares what they think happened.

“The results [of the poll] had finally been released, and were precisely the same as the results of the previous poll. Citizens had unanimously endorsed its governance, laws, and court rulings—wholeheartedly and dutifully supporting the just decrees that had recently been issued. Those conducting the poll had therefore decided not to conduct one again. To simplify matters, they would announce the previous poll’s results on a set yearly date.”

Ultimately, any source of information not read from the State-sanctioned script becomes unmentionable and even unthinkable.

“A long time passed, and the Events had nearly faded into memory, when one morning the Gate broadcast a public message, declaring that the square was secure again and open to pedestrians. The Disgraceful Events were over, it said, never to return again, and it urged citizens not to be misled by what they had seen, no matter how confident they were in the accuracy of their vision.”

“After that, the special channel began to broadcast new laws and decrees as the Gate issued them, one after the next, and forbade other channels from showing them. Then it decided to list the names of people whose applications and permits would be approved when the Gate opened, listing them on-screen at the end of every week. This attracted a huge viewership; people delighted in discovering who among them had been lucky and who had been rejected. Later, the Gate issued a decree that forbade other channels from screening any announcements other than its own and forced them to air its broadcasts instead. Its messages had become increasingly aggressive and intense, particularly after the Disgraceful Events, and it made the other channels replay them all. Some networks complied, but others refused and instead shut down their channels and offices. The Gate didn’t regulate radio stations the same way, though. It simply made sure it held sway over employees at the stations, and recruited loyal citizens, men and women alike, to call in to the programs while posing as unbiased listeners.”

In the face of Yeya’s pitiful attempts to save his life, the State remains inflexible. He cannot have a bullet removed if the State’s account of the events say that there were no bullets, right?

“No one was injured by any bullet that day or the day after or on any other day, do you understand? . . . The Disgraceful Events were simply a conspiracy hatched by some cowardly foreigners and a few measly traitors who had orchestrated the Events by planting seeds of discord among people, intentionally trying to divide them.”

Not even video footage could be allowed to complicate the State’s narrative. The Gate explains that such video was the result of a staged foreign movie made to look authentic.

“The countries involved in this joint production wanted it to look as natural as possible, so they kept the cameras and filming equipment hidden from view. The announcement added that it was one of the biggest action films in world history, explaining that this was why a few citizens had believed that there were bullets, tear gas, and smoke, even though there clearly hadn’t been anything like that, nothing except for standard special effects. The Gate called on everyone to remain calm, and avoid being misled by rumors that had been invented and spread by deranged lunatics.”

Clearly, any assertion that Yeya makes to a need for surgery amounts to an insurrection against “The Gate” and the tranquility it has brought to the country. And yet …

“Yehya knew where the bullet moving around in his pelvis came from, he’d seen who shot him, and nothing could deny or change that, not as long as he was still alive.”

Abdel Aziz is not done yet however. It is not simply the body of citizens and the mind of citizens that “The Gate” has fixed to control. It has a plan to subjugate the spirit as well. At numerous points in the novel, the author notes the ways that religious entities and personalities are employed in the service of the wider repression.

Any individual freedoms that citizens may have been left to enjoy can come under attack by religious persecution.

“Someone else quoted a passage from the Greater Book, and although she couldn’t make out what he said, she sensed from his tone that it was directed at her.”

Religion could be used to excommunicate citizens from public commerce and public community.

“The fatwa declared that if anyone insulted religion in any way, boycotting and ignoring them would be not only permissible but also a religious duty.”

“If this woman had any honor, she would know that to obey your Commander was to obey God, and that insubordination was a sin greater than any mortal could bear and would lead to her own demise. But she was probably corrupt, morally and otherwise—no scruples, no religion, not even wearing a respectable headscarf; he could see a strand of hair hanging down beneath that pitiful scrap of fabric on her head. Yes, she was definitely one of the people the Commander had warned him about, just talking to her was dangerous, she might mess with his mind, try to brainwash him.”

Religion could be used to deny people a right to assembly and protest.

“Gathering for any purpose other than to pray and understand religion was hateful, he repeatedly announced; it caused people to lose God’s favor, brought His wrath upon them, and was tantamount to apostasy.”

Religion could be used to instill passivity and docility into citizens and to dissuade them from protesting their own emasculation.

“He had singled her out in group prayers, claiming that the path she’d chosen led to an abyss of corruption, and that she was planting seeds of evil among people by urging them to think, and ask questions, and engage in other such undesirable activities.”

“The High Sheikh invoked a few passages from the Greater Book, explaining that if a believer were to be struck by a bullet (despite his prayers and supplication), his faith would guide him to the understanding that it was God himself who’d struck him down. A wounded believer should not despair or oppose God’s will. Nor should he question the unquestionable—such an act could lead him down a perilous path toward doubt. Instead, the believer must accept the will of God. He must acknowledge how lucky he was to be struck by a bullet, and exalted to a place in heaven ordinarily reserved only for the most dutiful.”

“The remedy to poverty was to bow down and pray and to stop her grousing and complaining.”

Religion could be used to get people to self-censor themselves.

“He added that to question them or gossip about matters of religion—as some fools were doing—was religiously impermissible.”

Religion could be used as a tool of social control over half the population.

“He arose from his seat to distribute an array of small booklets to the women, with titles like The Nature of Women, Torment and Blessing in the Grave, Suffering the Temptation of Women, and Conjugal Rights. He gave Ines the whole collection, saying it was a small gift to welcome her into a sisterhood of repentance and to celebrate her return to the path of guidance and truth.”

Is there anywhere in such a society where a person might take refuge from this pervasive State control? Might one carve out a place where some measure of personal control could be asserted, at least in privacy? Aziz is unsparing on this point. The Gate asserts that it has a “father’s right” to know everything about the citizen’s lives.

“He said it was the right of a father—and those of a father’s rank and position—to watch over his children, using all available means. This could not be considered an infringement of their privacy, he added, and ended his speech by saying that honest citizens had nothing to hide from their guardians.”

No information about a citizen can be declared off limits to the State. Yeya the patient has no privacy that the state needs to consider. Indeed, while the State has full access to his medical records, Yeya does not.

“This document examines the patient’s status after he left the hospital and was no longer under close medical supervision. It aims to create a comprehensive picture of the environment and conditions in which the patient lives and operates, to monitor possible developments (both medical and non-medical), and observe his close friends and acquaintances. Only doctors attending to this case and those with designated official IDs are permitted to examine this file, regardless of their professional specialization.”

Where does all this lead? Basma Abdel Aziz describes a population psychologically beaten down and almost incapable of mounting resistance. “Politics had eaten away at people’s heads until they in turn had begun to devour one another,” she says. Everyone is immobilized by the belief that the Gate is about to open – is about to begin serving people. “Everyone expected the queue to move at any minute, and they wanted to be ready” She says.

“Many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there. The new decrees and regulations spared no one.”

No one speaks out.

“How honorable they were not to leave the house when the Disgraceful Events broke out!”

“What laudable principles they had, which had kept them from being swept up in lies or spreading false rumors themselves.”

No one contradicts.

“He [Tarek] knew full well that the visit had something to do with the Gate of the Northern Building. Tarek would have been a fool to think there wouldn’t be consequences if he crossed a man like that, especially in such difficult and uncertain times.”

“It’s impossible to act against the official instructions we receive from the Gate. You both know how it is.”

No one notices what a dystopia they are living in.

“The queue was like a magnet. It drew people toward it, then held them captive as individuals and in their little groups, and it stripped them of everything, even the sense that their previous lives had been stolen from them.”

No one even imagines that things as they are are the result of “The Gate’s” policy.

“Amani would laugh, too—she could never be convinced that the independence she believed she possessed was in truth no more than an accepted illusion, part of a web of relations and contradictions. The Gate itself was an integral part of the system, too, even if from the outside it appeared to pull all the strings.”

Everything as it is, is inevitable. Resistance, where it exists, peeks above the surface of society like a single blade of grass in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

“Standing there in the queue, he toyed with the possibility of freedom; he wanted, even if only in the smallest way, to cast off what he was used to doing so mechanically and to break the tedium of these countless weeks of waiting. He marked his place on the ground, told people nearby that he was leaving, as was customary in the queue, and then decided that for the rest of the day he would no longer do what was expected of him.”

In the midst of all this dystopian gloom, there are two characters who are in transition. The doctor, Tarek and Yeya’s friend Amani. At the beginning of the story, Tarek is cowed by the pressures that have been brought to bear on him not to treat Yeya. “Tarek was a man who didn’t overstep boundaries,” Aziz writes, “a man who’d never been to the Gate, not once in his life.”

“Tarek had never questioned the Gate’s definitive and crushing triumph. But he wasn’t altogether enthusiastic about it, either, particularly given the sorts of injuries he’d attended to in the emergency room.”

Conversely, at the beginning of the story, Amani is unflinchingly devoted to getting Yeya the treatment that he needs come hell or high water. Over the course of the novel, Tarek begins to resist – his good heart overcoming his “good sense.” In the same time frame, Amani is traumatized into subservience.

“Things had happened to her that no one else knew, things she couldn’t speak of, things she still hadn’t admitted even to herself.”

After her incarceration and experience in solitary confinement, Aziz tells us that “she surrendered to the conclusions that she began to weave around the Gate’s message.” She becomes an agent of the tyranny.

“Then she tried to convince Yehya that the bullet that had pierced his side and lodged itself in his pelvis was a fake bullet, that it wasn’t important to remove it, and that he no longer needed to trouble himself with the matter of who had shot him.”

Tarek becomes unable to “pretend as if nothing had happened.” And thus, suddenly, “in a moment of wild rage, he decided to go to the queue in search of Yehya.”

As for Amani, the novel concludes by telling us the following:

“Amani relaxed. She’d found what she’d long hoped for in the Gate’s message—stability and tranquillity—while Yehya kept slowly bleeding.

… But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding.

“Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed spent one hundred and forty nights of his life in the queue.”

Question for Comment: How does a story like this influence your disposition to grant your government power. Clearly, if it is too weak to abuse you, it may be too weak to serve you. But the converse may also be true. If it is powerful enough to help you, it may be powerful enough to hurt you. This story revolves around the government’s power to grant a medical treatment or deny it. Would you want your government to have that power? Why or why not?

"I mean, your character, Maria, not you."tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad3747b46200c2018-10-20T17:09:30-07:002018-10-20T17:09:30-07:00Clouds of Sils Maria REVIEW I have not much to say about this film. I found it ingenious but without a point to the genius in the end. A middle aged actress who became a star at the age of 18 in a play where she played a young seductress...Philip Crossman

Clouds of Sils Maria REVIEW

I have not much to say about this film. I found it ingenious but without a point to the genius in the end. A middle aged actress who became a star at the age of 18 in a play where she played a young seductress of her employer is now asked, 20 years later, to play the part of the employer. To prepare for the part, she rehearses lines with her own assistant and (here is the ingenious part), you cannot really tell sometimes what lines the two are simply reading or rehearsing and what lines they are actually saying I conversation with one another.

Thus in several instances as you listen to the dialog, you are asking yourself, “Is this the actress and her assistant or are these the lines of the play that they are rehearsing? The fact that experiences the actress had when making the original film twenty years earlier keep intruding into her memory and reflections adds another layer of complexity. As the recites her lines you are asking yourself, Is this emotion just acting? Or is it a response to memory of herself at the age of eighteen? Or is there something really going on with her assistant?”

This double and triple entendre keeps the movie interesting as does the lovely scenery in Switzerland. But when the film is over, you are left wondering just what the point was other than to mess with your head a little.

Question for Comment: Have you ever acted in a play? And if so, did what was happening in your character’s life intersect with what was happening in your own?

You know there is no other waytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad399d56e200d2018-10-17T16:54:22-07:002018-10-20T17:02:13-07:00Scene from the Romanian movie, Graduation. [Background] A middle aged Romanian doctor (Romeo) and his wife (Magda) have an eighteen year old daughter (Eliza) who has earned a place at Cambridge University in England. She just needs to do well on her final three graduation tests. The day before her...Philip Crossman

Scene from the Romanian movie, Graduation.

[Background] A middle aged Romanian doctor (Romeo) and his wife (Magda) have an eighteen year old daughter (Eliza) who has earned a place at Cambridge University in England. She just needs to do well on her final three graduation tests. The day before her first test, she is sexually assaulted on a street near the school. She sprains her wrist defending herself but the attacker gets away. She is traumatized and her right arm does not allow her to write during day one of the exam and it becomes clear that her placement at Cambridge is in jeopardy. Her father, a general honest man who has come to believe that his daughter must get out of Romania if she is to have any chance at a decent life, uses his influence to find a way for his daughter to cheat on the final two exams. He has someone who can fix the exam in exchange for Romeo’s influence getting the official a liver transplant. Following is the discussion between Romeo and his wife, Magda, about whether or not to have Eliza agree to cheat (she has to mark her paper I a certain way so that it can be altered by the scorers). There is nothing in any of the scenes that would cause you to want to move to this place and it seems that almost everyone who has gotten ahead in any way has had to compromise principles to get ahead. The police, the doctors, the school officials, etc. They all take bribes or peddle influence for favors that they need.

MAGDA: Once she starts going down this path, there is no going back. … you know in your heart that it is not right. This isn’t the path I want Eliza to take in life. I am sure you feel the same.

ROMEO: If there were any other way, you think I would even consider this?

MAGDA: She shouldn’t be doing this.

ROMEO: Magda, we raised her determined that she’d leave here. What if she misses this chance? She can’t handle life here.

MAGDA: She’ll learn. We were just as unprepared at her age. We handled it.

ROMEO: Did we? How did we handle it? By doing the very things we never wanted her to do?

MAGDA: But how can she start off in life with this burden on her shoulders?

ROMEO: What burden Magda? This exam is just a formality. Everyone cheats on their final exams.

MAGDA: I didn’t cheat.

ROMEO: Fine. You didn’t. In any case, this exam makes no difference in the end. Even what they studied in school is useless. All that counts is getting into a normal world.

MAGDA: How you get there matters too. Its not right to -

ROMEO: Being accosted in broad daylight on a busy street – is that right? You want her to live here?

MAGDA: It was an accident.

ROMEO: No, it wasn’t. You ended up in some library because you were honest. Sometimes the result is all that matters. It’s our decision. She needn’t feel guilty.

MAGDA: This isn’t something you can decide for her.

ROMEO: So what do you suggest?

MAGDA: I don’t know.

ROMEO: You know there is no other way but you won’t take any responsibility … knowing that I will fix it.

MAGDA: No. but I am aware that honesty comes with a price and I was willing to pay it.

ROMEO: You could afford to because I took care of everything. If this situation were about me, I would pay any price but I won’t have my child paying it.

MAGDA: She is my child too.

ROMEO: Is she? Fine, then you go talk to her.

Romeo goes to speak with Eliza and to offer her what she needs to do to cheat. …

ROMEO: Sometimes it is the results that count. Don’t get me wrong. We raised you to always be honest. But this is the world we live in and sometimes we have to fight using this world’s weapons. This is a precaution that will get you where you want to go – where you deserve to go. From there, you can do what you think is best.

ELIZA: What I think is best?

ROMEO: Yes. Trust me, if there were any way of changing things here [in Romania], I’d urge you to stay and fight. But it is enough that we stayed. Let others try now. We have done our part.

ELIZA: What does mom say?

ROMEO: I think she understands that life has its winners and losers. And we want you to be a winner and have a good life because you won’t get another.

Question for Comment: What would you do if you were Eliza?

A Sustained Act of Random Kindnesses tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a013486d93b71970c022ad36d388e200c2018-09-22T21:26:02-07:002018-09-22T21:26:02-07:00The Kid with a Bike REVIEW First of all, this movie needs a better title. Having said that, more people should watch it than probably will. It is not often that a child actor inhabits his (or her) character this convincingly. Cyril is about ten. He lives in a home...Philip Crossman

The Kid with a Bike REVIEW

First of all, this movie needs a better title.

Having said that, more people should watch it than probably will. It is not often that a child actor inhabits his (or her) character this convincingly. Cyril is about ten. He lives in a home for abandoned children. His biological father has literally abandoned him (if you can imagine) and works in a restaurant not far from Cyril’s orphanage.

Cyril is like all of us I suppose. He has to figure out which people in his life are worthy of his loyalty. There are always going to be people who should care for us but lack the responsibility or character to do so. There are always going to be people who pretend to care for us to get something out of us. We can only hope that there will be people who, by the grace of God, pick us up out of the gutter and love in spite of our lack of appreciation for them. The secret to life is figuring out who is who and intelligently surrendering the need for those we wish would care, the illusion that all who pretend to care do, and the fear that those who do care are just pretending. The secret is in offering our affection and loyalty to those with the true hearts.

Question for Comment: Who has abandoned you? Who has deceived you? Who has loved you out of nowhere?